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Looking for some help to ID a Pleco. I bought 7 of them as L-201 but the more pictures I look at I am thinking they are Hypancistrus Inspector L-102. If you have a guess on the sex ratio that would be great as well.

Here are a few more pictures.

I don't know about them being . According to its description, H. inspector should have a distinct black margin on its dorsal and caudal fins. And although your photos of your fish from the side are not the best, I don't see any sign of a black margin on those fins. When your fish are swimming around in your tank, relaxed (as opposed to stressed out in the photo setting), do you see a black margin on these fins?

If the margin is present, then I would agree you have H. inspector. Otherwise, no. I've never seen any of these species in life, so I'm basing my opinion only on the photos. But without the black fin margins, I'd say yours are either or . In fact, based on the large size of the white spots on your fish, I'm more inclined towards guessing H. contradens.

Hopefully someone else can confirm this one way or the other.

Cheers, Eric

Thanks a lot for the info Eric. Here are a few side pictures to get a better look at the dorsal fin.

Your fish are

Here is a picture of my Hypancistrus Inspector adult female, black line on the dorsal fin clearly visible:



And a picture of a juvenile from my breeding group, although the dorsal fin is not up you can still see the black at the end of the fin:

Hi @jac,

I agree, not inspector. But how do we tell the difference between and ? These fish look rather young, so I imagine spot size will be shrink with age. Would the other differences listed on the contradens CLOG page (flatter body, larger spots) be evident at this size? What is your experience?

Thanks, Eric

For me it's pretty darn hard unless you have one of each next to each other.

Kinda reminds me of L136b as there seems to be some fry with a smaller spotting pattern. L136 is variable with pattern but as an adult is usually a more washed out gray, not black. here is a bad pic of a fry i had back in the day.

Really nice pics, such big eyes!

Jools

Jools wrote:Really nice pics, such big eyes!

Jools

If you're referring to the Inspector, you can have them for the cat-e-log if you want Jools

jac wrote:If you're referring to the Inspector, you can have them for the cat-e-log if you want Jools

Done! Thank you, jac.

(... even if he wasn't referring to the inspector, they are still nice clean pics. So they're up now! LOL)

Thank you good people!

Jools

What is the size of your Hyps?

Some of them seem to be rather fat/gravid. But they still look tiny on the other hand. If they are still juveniles but bigger than 5cm, I'd place my bets on H. Contradens (white dots will be smaller on L201). On the other hand, with some of them looking gravid like this, they could be adult L471s... and most likely only females at that. But all of that really depends on their size and age.